High-altitude balloons beaming the internet to remote areas are to be launched over Sri Lanka after the country became the first to sign up to Google’s Project Loon.
Michael Cassidy, the head of Project Loon, travelled to Sri Lanka this week to finalise the agreement with Ranil Wickremesinghe, the prime minister.
“The entire Sri Lankan island, every village, will be covered with affordable high-speed internet,” Mangala Samaraweera, the IT minister, said.
Muhunthan Canagey, the head of Sri Lanka’s Information and Communication Technology Agency, said he expected Google to have launched the

A rugby player paralysed in a car crash two years ago has walked for the first
time with the help of a robotic exoskeleton controlled by his thoughts.
Rob Camm, 21, was left with no movement at all by the accident a week before
he was due to start a degree in politics, philosophy and economics at the
University of York. He had just played his final rugby match for his local
team when he was injured. He spent 96 days in intensive care at Frenchay
hospital in Bristol before being transferred to a specialist spinal injuries
unit in Salisbury.
He is able to control the mech

On a romantic visit to the place where you first met your love, your phone bleeps. You take it from your pocket and hold it in the air to see a virtual bubble hovering in front of your eyes. It pops, revealing a photograph from that first date years ago. “Happy anniversary,” says the message that accompanies it.
Digital messages such as this can be scattered around the physical world following the launch of an app that lets people leave virtual gifts for one another. The free app, Traces, could be used to create a virtual treasure hunt, or even alert your partner to pick up milk as they walk

Seasoned procrastinators are in for a shock. To play solitaire uninterrupted in the new version of Microsoft Windows, they will have to dip their hands in their pockets.
The card game, which has soothed stressed office workers and entertained bored students since 1990, now costs £1.19 a month or £7.69 a year unless gamers can stand interruptions by 30-second adverts between hands.
Solitaire reappeared this week as part of Windows 10 after being left out of Windows 8, the previous version of the computer operating system. Users of Windows 8 had to download Microsoft Solitaire Collection sepa